Google Suffered Five Minute Outage on Friday Afternoon

At 7:52 pm EST on Friday evening, Google went down.

It wasn't just Google that went down, but all of its other sites as well. Youtube.com, the most popular online video site in the world, went down. Gmail.com, an online email program that is used by hundreds of millions of people across the world, also went down.

The response from the public was immediate. Many people took to Twitter and Facebook, wanting to verify with others that Google was, in fact, down. According to reports, thousands of Tweets were posted every minute about Google during the downtime.

At 7:57 pm EST, Google.com and all of its associated sites came back online.

The company hasn't publicly acknowledged the downtime or the reason behind it yet. The last time that Google suffered any prolonged downtime was in 2009, when a catastrophic network failure took the company's sites offline.

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According to reports, Google's outage resulted in global Internet traffic dipping by 40%.

Once Google came back online, Internet traffic spiked to well above normal levels for a couple of minutes before levelling off. For this reason, many believe that if Google took a hit to its bottom line, it was very small.

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Anybody doubting the power of Google should take a good, hard look at the hit to global Internet traffic when the behemoth momentarily went down.